Christina Plank

• Senior Scientist
• BOKU University

Degrowth and food sovereignty movements share commitments to social-ecological transformation, democracy and the flourishing of human and non-human life. Encounters between the two movements have been relatively limited, however. This contribution is based on a literature review and a workshop held at the 9th International Degrowth Conference in Za...

The current food regime has experienced a multidimensional crisis, driving further unjust and unsustainable development. Various food alternatives address these challenges by promoting different modes of alternative production and consumption. However, they are not extensively theoretically addressed within the food regime literature. Thus, we sugg...

Food is becoming an increasingly important issue in the urban context. Urban food policies are a new phenomenon in Czechia, where urban food alternatives to the current food regime are promoted by food movements or take the form of traditional self-provisioning. This paper examines how urban food governance in Prague and Brno is constituted based o...

Degrowth is increasingly grappling with the question of how to bring about social-ecological transformation. Degrowth researchers and activists have long described and engaged in a variety of actions ranging from building bottom-up alternatives over developing policy proposals to participating in blockades. But only recently has degrowth explicitly...

Debates on provisioning systems have become more widespread in recent years. Most of these discussions, however, have centered on the monetized economy. While they have elaborated on actors and institutions in the monetized economy, they tend to ignore the foundational role of unpaid provisioning processes. this article contributes to provisioning...

Vienna's biomass demand is large and nearly all biomass consumed in the city is produced in the regional and global hinterland. This raises the question, how the socioecological conditions at specific places somewhere in the world are impacted by urban consumption and how negative impacts can be addressed and mitigated by urban actors. Here we focu...

Christina Plank : Strategien zur sozial-ökologischen Transformation im Agrar-und Ernährungssystem (S. 6−14) Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Frage von Strategie und Degrowth im Agrar-und Ernährungs-system. Er untersucht verschiedene Strategien, die in der Degrowth-Literatur vorkommen und von der Degrowth-Bewegung mit dem Ziel einer sozial-ökolo...

The notion of societal boundaries aims to enhance the debate on planetary boundaries. The focus is on capitalist societies as a heuristic for discussing the expansionary dynamics, power relations, and lock-ins of modern societies that impel highly unsustainable societal relations with nature. While formulating societal boundaries implies a controve...

The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. The article starts by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of planetary boundaries from a social science perspective. It is argued that the growth imperative of capitalist economies, as well as other particular characterist...

Zusammenfassung Die Literatur diskutiert eine Reduktion von Treibhausgasemissionen in der Agrar- Ernährungswirtschaft. Dies findet jedoch wenig Resonanz in bisherigen klimapolitischen Strategien. Das größte Potenzial zur Reduktion der Emission von Treibhausgasen liegt in der Produktion, Distribution sowie im Konsum von tierischen Produkten. (hohe Ü...

Globale Krisen wie der Klimawandel und die Corona-Pandemie machen die Politische Ökologie zu einem unverzichtbaren Forschungsfeld der Zukunft. Die Beiträger*innen des ersten deutschsprachigen Handbuchs zum Thema stellen die hierfür relevanten Theorien vor und zeigen anhand konkreter Konflikte und Kämpfe die Aktualität und den Mehrwert einer politis...

https://www.transcript-verlag.de/media/pdf/60/ab/59/oa9783839456279.pdf

Globale Krisen wie der Klimawandel und die Corona-Pandemie machen die Politische Ökologie zu einem unverzichtbaren Forschungsfeld der Zukunft. Die Beiträger*innen des ersten deutschsprachigen Handbuchs zum Thema stellen die hierfür relevanten Theorien vor und zeigen anhand konkreter Konflikte und Kämpfe die Aktualität und den Mehrwert einer politis...

Degrowth is a counter-hegemonic movement that has the ambitious aim of transforming society towards social and ecological justice. But how do we get there? That is the question this book addresses. Adhering to the multiplicity of degrowth whilst also arguing that strategic prioritisation and coordination are key, Degrowth & Strategy advances the...

Following the goal of a post-fossil economy, institutional actors promote techno-managerial solution strategies, for example the green economy and the bioeconomy. While these strategies focus on technological progress to decouple economic growth from carbon dioxide emissions, the associated additional demand for raw materials causes a new global la...

Physical components of societies like infrastructures need biophysical resources for their construction, maintenance and use. These components, analyzed as societies' material stocks, predefine energy and raw materials and provide societal services, necessary for their functioning and for social welfare. The nexus between stocks, the resource flows...

The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. We bring a critical social science perspective to this framework through the notion of societal boundaries and aim to provide a more nuanced understanding of the social nature of thresholds. We start by highlighting the strength...

Climate policy integration (CPI) is regarded in the literature as key to combatting climate change. It has been critically discussed to what extent climate policy is integrated in different policy fields at the European and the national level. In this paper, we analyze the expectations toward CPI from the perspective of stakeholders focusing on two...

In the face of looming population growth of nearly 10 billion people by 2050, the earth’s temperature rising creating uncontrollable climatic conditions of extreme variability and intensities new approaches are needed to support an equitable and just food system. Over the years multinational corporations that have commandeered the food system have...

Current globalized agricultural and food systems operate with an unsustainable capitalist model of production and consumption. The middle and upper classes of the global North and, increasingly, of emerging economies live at the expense of the global South. This has been referred to as the “imperial mode of living”. An alternative model of producti...

Despite considerable advancements over the last couple of years, research on the Anthropocene still faces at least two challenges: (1) integrating different approaches from natural, social and cultural sciences, and (2) clarifying the political relevance of this concept. To address these challenges, we propose an interdisciplinary approach from Soc...

This article analyzes the roles, relations, and positions of scholar-activists in the European food sovereignty movement. In doing so, we document, make visible and question the political dimensions of researchers' participation in the movement. We argue that scholar-activists are part of the movement, but are distinct from the affected constituenc...

Dieser Beitrag beleuchtet die Rolle von wertebasierten Produktions- und Konsumweisen im dritten Nahrungsmittelregime. Anhand der drei analytischen Dimensionen Institutionen, Materialität und Werte werden Beispiele Initiativen Solidarischer Landwirt-schaft in Österreich mittels qualitativer Sozialforschung explorativ untersucht. Ergebnisse zeigen au...

The development of an economically viable biofuel industry rests on strong state subsidies for production and processing, creation of markets through government procurement, fuel-blending mandates, price controls, as well as foreign trade tariffs and quotas, and multiple interventions in agricultural, ecological, and other regulations. We use an ap...

Exponential growth in oil palm land and palm oil production in Indonesia currently makes the country the world’s largest producer of this vegetable oil. Throughout its tumultuous political past from the 1960s until today, conditions were created which enabled the expansion of oil palm plantations. Under President Suharto’s “New Order,” territoriali...

As demand for natural resources increases due to the rise in world population and living standards, conflicts over their access and control are becoming more prevalent. This book critically assesses different approaches to and conceptualizations of resource fairness and justice and applies them to the analysis of resource conflicts. Approaches addr...

Right to Food and Nutrition Watch 2015. People’s Nutrition is Not a Business, Issue 07, 77-78

Palm oil is used in human nutrition and industrial products including cosmetics and biodiesel. Exponential growth in oil palm land and palm oil production in Indonesia currently make the country the world’s largest producer of this vegetable oil. The expansion of oil palm plantations is linked to processes of territorialization and reterritorializa...

Patterns of Global Biomass Trade – Implications for food sovereignty and socio environmental conflicts. EJOLT Report No. 20, 56-63

Ukraine was once considered the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, its agriculture subject to both extensification and intensification measures. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, both these processes were reversed, giving modern-day Ukraine the image of untapped agricultural potential. Alongside the country's proximity to the European Un...

The financialisation of land is an important but still under-researched component of the land-grabbing process. This is particularly valid for the post-soviet region. In this paper we sketch the increasing financialisation of farmland in Ukraine. We show how the ruling class, the Ukrainian oligarchs, use the (international) state-economy relations...

The fast-changing events in Ukraine evoke once more the question of how to understand the Ukrainian state. Instead of following concepts that depict Ukraine as “weak”, “captured”, or “incomplete”, I propose to analyse the Ukrainian state as “a social relation”. Applying this Poulantzian understanding enables us to link the state in a narrow sense w...

Der Beitrag verfolgt zwei wesentliche Ziele. Zum einen soll er einen einführenden Überblick über das Phänomen Land Grabbing geben. Zum anderen wollen wir ausgewählte Aspekte der kritischen sozialwissenschaftlichen Debatte vorstellen. Dabei beziehen wir uns auf Arbeiten des internationalen Forschungsnetzwerks „Land Deal Politics Initiative“ (LDPI) s...